Medical affairs teams at healthcare and life sciences companies rely on the ability to use STM (scientific, technical, medical) literature to engage healthcare providers (HCPs) and key opinion leaders (KOLs), educate patients, and train internal teams on the latest information about their company’s products.
At CCC, we provide a full range of copyright compliance solutions for medical affairs professionals. Here’s a look at how they work, and how different use cases determine which option is most appropriate:
What is collective licensing?
Collective licensing solutions, such as CCC’s Annual Copyright License (ACL), provide a consistent set of reuse rights that cover internal, collaborative uses of content that complement subscriptions and purchases, such as forwarding a copy to a colleague via email, handing out hard copies to a small group of employees, or storing a copy in a collaboration tool, with a limited set of external uses (e.g., regulatory filings, responding to a request from an HCP, etc.).
What are “pay-per-use” permissions?
Transactional or “pay-per-use” licensing available through RightsLink for Permissions (RLP) and CCC Marketplace enables medical affairs team members to obtain permissions for external promotional uses such as in medical communications projects. Examples of these projects include permissions to reuse figures, tables, and charts from scientific articles, often from multiple publishers, in a congress presentation or on a website.
Two paths to copyright permission
CCC plays a role in managing rights on behalf of rightsholders, and there are fundamental differences between collective and transactional licensing.
Reproduction rights organizations (RROs) like CCC serve as an intermediary between content rightsholders, like authors and publishers, and content users. RROs manage reproduction rights collectively, issue licenses to users, collect fees, and distribute royalties back to the rightsholders. This simplifies permission processes for users and compensates rightsholders for the use of their copyrighted works.
A collective repertory license like the ACL enables organizations—including pharmaceutical companies—to reuse content from participating rightsholders for a variety of internal business purposes for a single annual fee without needing to obtain permission and pay for each use separately.
A transactional or “pay-per-use” copyright license is a specific, case-specific license agreement between a copyright holder and a user. The license is for a specific, single transaction. The user contacts the copyright holder or their agent directly to secure permission to reuse the content. Both RightsLink for Permissions and CCC Marketplace offer transactional licensing for the reuse of copyrighted content, as well as the purchase of bulk article reprints/ePrints and single documents.
Here’s a look at how the ACL can support teams, including Medical Affairs, across life science companies:
- Medical Affairs can incorporate figures from peer-reviewed studies into internal training programs designed for staff and regional field teams.
- Scientists can store articles related to research for a new product on a team site for a collaborative review of existing literature by team members or use an internal AI tool to summarize a set of scientific articles.
- Drug Safety & Pharmacovigilance can annotate and store copies of scientific articles related to adverse effects of a company product in an internal database to fulfill regulatory compliance obligations.
- Product Marketing can substantiate claims made in promotional materials by storing the full text of a supporting source in the same system used to develop, manage, and approve marketing content.
- Corporate Communication can embed a PDF version of a recent newspaper article about the company into an internal company newsletter or post it to the company’s intranet site for employee awareness.
- Regulatory teams can submit copies of articles to government agencies where required as part of a regulatory filing.
- Medical Science Liaisons can respond to a medical information request from an HCP or patient by sending a single digital copy of a scientific article about a specific drug or therapy.
Get permissions for external promotional uses
For those organizations that do not have the ACL or need permissions for external content uses that go beyond the scope of those provided by the ACL, such as for conference presentations, web postings, reference guides, and other medical communications activities, medical affairs teams can obtain permissions through RightsLink for Permissions or CCC Marketplace.
There are some differences between these two services. RightsLink for Permissions enables users to purchase copyright permissions and article reprints/ePrints directly at the point-of-content on a publisher’s website. If you need to purchase permissions from several publishers for a particular project, CCC Marketplace enables you to search, order, and manage copyright permissions from thousands of publishers, as well as purchase article reprints/ePrints, and copies.
Project tools in Marketplace enable you to purchase a variety of rights and create distinct projects to easily track status and budget and share project details with internal stakeholders. You can learn more about CCC Marketplace here.
Efficient and compliant content use with CCC licensing
Both the ACL and transactional permissions available via RightsLink for Permissions and CCC Marketplace have clear benefits for medical affairs teams. The seamless, broad access to a wide range of trusted materials provided by the ACL enables efficient and compliant internal reuse of content at scale without administrative delays for common internal reuses of content. Transactional licensing through RightsLink for Permissions and CCC Marketplace enable medical affairs teams to license content for external promotional uses.